Thecus N8800 8TB review

Not content with delivering the first seven-bay desktop NAS system, the N7700, Thecus now pushes further into rackmount territory with the N8800 - its first eight-bay appliance. The model on review came with an octet of 1TB SATA drives configured as a single RAID6 dual redundant array.

The drives fit in lockable hot-swap carriers that can be protected with a flip-up grille. The N8800 uses the same motherboard as the N7700, and has a 1.86GHz Celeron M processor and 1GB of DDR2 memory. There are also a couple of PCI Express expansion slots but, as with the N7700, don't take these into consideration as Thecus hasn't decided what to do with them yet.

Fault tolerance is good, as along with plenty of RAID array choices you have two hot-plug power supplies, plus Gigabit ports can be linked to load-balanced or failover teams. Power usage is modest, with the appliance rarely drawing more than 140W during testing. The web interface is easy to use, but its boring design hasn't changed for years.

The N8800 supports multiple RAID arrays and space can be set aside for iSCSI target creation, with each array supporting up to five virtual volumes within this space. Make sure you allocate the appropriate amount within each one, as this can't be increased later on.

Thecus supports Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac systems, and access security extends to a local user database plus AD authentication. FTP services are available, and installing a free update module turns the appliance into a web server. There's another for IP camera support, but you can't view live feeds and can only take scheduled snapshots from multiple cameras and store them on the appliance.

FarStone's DriveClone Pro secures files and folders on workstations at scheduled intervals, offers snapshots for disaster recovery, and supports drive and partition cloning.

Thecus' Nsync copies data from one appliance to another to a schedule, and volume snapshots are supported only if you use the ZFS file system. The stackable feature is unique, as you declare iSCSI targets on other Thecus appliances that support IP SANs to the N8800, which can export them as network shares with ACLs applied.

For testing we used a Dell PowerEdge R610 with dual 2.4GHz E5530 CPUs plus 12GB of DDR3 memory, and loaded with Windows Server 2003 R2 x64. Initial Iometer tests reported raw read and write rates of 107MB/sec and 102MB/sec. Real-world tests were good, with copies of a 2.52GB video clip returning 69MB/sec and 59MB/sec, while FileZilla reported read and write speeds of 89MB/sec and 76MB/sec. IP SAN speeds were also impressive, with Iometer reporting a top raw read rate of 104MB/sec.

The 8TB N8800 scores on a number of counts, as it's top value and lightning fast. The myriad multimedia features won't impress businesses, but as a high-capacity rackmount NAS and IP SAN appliance, the N8800 will take a lot of beating.

Author: Dave Mitchell